The Value an Alumni Nation Delivers to Your Outreach Efforts

posted by Jim Burgraff | 841sc
November 15, 2017

In many ways, your alumni can be the most passionate advocates of your school or district. However, as the years pass and people get on with their lives, they often lose a sense of connection with their alma mater. It’s little surprise that schools and districts have such a hard time maintaining up-to-date contact information for their alumni.

By establishing an Alumni Nation, you can create a digital community to find alumni, complete with a database and CRM tool that makes it easy to update and append your records. You can also incorporate social matching, tagging and filtering. Your alumni, in turn, can update their own profiles and information in your system, making matters significantly easier on your organization.

By understanding the demographics, communication methods and interests of your graduates, an Alumni Nation enables you to connect with alumni and stay connected with them for years to come. Our team also helps you develop a strategy to align your needs with theirs, with a communication plan and content marketing effort to keep them engaged. We also assist in establishing automated workflow methods so you can more easily track engagement while leveraging technology to improve your capacity.

The result is powerful member management, information tracking and event setup with RSVP and ticketing features. You’ll also foster much-improved communication thanks to an ability to send unlimited email messages.

Why is it important to maintain good alumni communication?

Effective alumni outreach is about more than just fishing for donations. Below are just a few reasons why your school should make it a priority to maintain contact with graduates:

Enhanced branding: Strategic public relations and alumni outreach help you support your school or district’s brand identity. Everything about the look and feel of your school is contained in its brand—the colors and logos, your mascot, the tone of communications and even the fonts you use. You should always have a distinct, clear brand and organizational personality.

Strong messaging: Your messaging is an important aspect of your brand. By maintaining regular communication, you can make emotional connections by using the same branding and tone they remember from their days as students. Trust, nostalgia and pride are big points of focus.

Long-lasting connections: You can get your alumni to participate in surveys and discussions on a variety of issues, news and events. This becomes particularly important if you are in the middle of a referendum or ballot measure, or if you’re raising money in a capital campaign.

Alumni make up an important stakeholder group

In an era of tight budgets and increased competition, schools and districts must market themselves like never before. As you develop the strategy for your organization, don’t forget to include alumni as you identify and think about reaching your target audience. Establishing an Alumni Nation could be the solution you need to make it happen.